Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Even Easier Recovery: Create a Recovery Drive From Your Cr-48

I've covered creating a Cr-48 recovery drive from Windows in the past but even that can be a hassle when you're not in front of your computer. Why can't we create the recovery USB or SD Card from our Cr-48? Now you can, just follow these easy steps:

If you're not already in Developer Mode, you need to flip the switch underneath your battery. See here for details, just follow steps 1-7.

With your Cr-48 connected to WiFi or Ethernet, get to a shell prompt. There are two ways to do this:

If you're having trouble even opening a web page on your Cr-48, you can press CTRL+ALT+=> (=> is the forward arrow just above the numbers 2 and 3 on the keyboard). This works before or after you login. Now login as the user "chronos". No password should be needed. If CTRL+ALT+=> doesn't do anything, make sure you're in developer mode (see step 1)

If you're logged in, you can press CTRL+ALT+T and then type "shell". If it says shell isn't a valid command, make sure you're in developer mode (see step 1)

You should now be at a shell prompt. Note that you do not and should not need to be root to continue, the script will manage that itself, you can remain as user chronos.

Now you're ready to run the recovery drive creation script. This command is case-sensitive, make sure you get it exactly right. If you get an error along the lines of "site not found, make sure you have Internet connectivity on your Cr-48. To start the script, just type:

cd; wget http://goo.gl/e3cdo; sudo sh e3cdo

Once the roughly 320mb image downloads and unpacks, the script will show you USB and SD Card drives that the image can be written to. Any 2gb or larger drive will work and some 1gb drives work also, the script will warn you if a drive is to small. If you haven't plugged your drive in yet, plug it in and hit Enter to scan again. It may take 10-20 seconds for the drive to initialize so you may need to hit Enter a few times.

To confirm that you definitely want to use the drive and that you understand all information on the drive will be lost, the script makes you type "YES" and "DoIt". Both are case-sensitive and that's "Do It" as in the Nike slogan, "Just..." Once that's done, the image will be written to the drive.

Lastly, the script will ask if it should delete temp files. Unless you plan to create more recovery disks in the very near future, you should say yes here to free up 1.2gb on your drive.